What a strange, strange game we had yesterday. Felix’s command was awful, but he was still difficult to square up. The M’s new-look defense largely did OK on balls in play, but made critical errors in the 5th inning. Adam Lind in there against a tough lefty looked bad in hindsight, but I wonder if that wasn’t a slightly modified version of the old Joe Maddon “Danks Rule” – trying to take away a change-up specialist’s best pitch by hitting SAME handed hitters against him. Robbie Cano still looks great at the plate, and Mike Montgomery was something of a revelation, at least for a day.

We now have a whole game’s worth of pitch fx data, which is both fun to look at and too small to mean much. Following on gameday, Montgomery’s numbers were so anomalous that it looked like he was throwing a new pitch. Now, a day later, and after BrooksBaseball’s cleaned it up and recalculated stuff… it looks like he’s throwing a different new pitch. What I initially saw were a group of four-seam fastballs with sky-high – like, outrageously high – vertical movement. That’s *never* been a strength of Montgomery. He’s generated plenty of horizontal movement with his arm action and mechanics, but he doesn’t get big time spin rates or backspin. Yesterday, it looked like he did…at times. Brooks shows just a single change-up, but two really odd “sinkers” thrown around 90 with sub-0 vertical movement. I’m skeptical that such a pitch can actually be thrown (unless it’s thrown sidearm), but there they are. Do I think Montgomery can vary his fastball vertical movement by well over a foot? No, but… that’d be cool. And whatever he was throwing, it was working. Unfortunately for the M’s, the Rangers bullpen looked equally good.

Which means it’s all the more important that they get to lefty Martin Perez early today. Perez is a former hyped uber-prospect who’s never quite been able to get over the 4th-5th starter hump. He’s got solid velocity, decent-ish command of five pitches, and he keeps the ball on the ground (important when you play in Texas). Unfortunately, he’s got a couple of big problems that stand in the way of growth. First is simply health. Perez has missed time due to TJ surgery, which killed off nearly his entire 2014 season and much of his 2015 as well. But beyond that, he’s *always* struggled to strand baserunners. This is why a guy who yields suspiciously few home runs can *still* put up ugly ERAs in the current low-run environment. For his career, he’s stranded fewer than 70% of baserunners. His opponent today, Hisashi Iwakuma, sits at the other end of this distribution, with a career mark of nearly 79%, which is one reason FIP consistently under-values Kuma.

Why would this be? How real is this? That’s hard to tell, frankly, especially when Perez’s career been marred by an injury and a long rehab. And he was great at it in 2013, somewhat randomly. But this pattern was present in the lowest levels of the minors, and it’s what drove his AAA numbers into the toilet. With runners on, Perez walks more and strikes out fewer opponents, and that’s a big deal for someone who doesn’t miss many bats to begin with. Maybe he faces more hitters counts with runners on? Maybe he’s just not comfortable out of the stretch? Maybe it’s dumb luck? Let’s hope it keeps up today.

The M’s kick off their 2016 season as a strange kind of dark horse contender. They’ve completely overhauled the roster and the front office, and despite a painful 2015, and despite the myriad failings false starts dogging them, they’re neck and neck with some of the best teams in the American League. A lot of that has to do with today’s starter, a wise and magnanimous King. The M’s are going for the tenth straight opening day win in large part because Felix has started most of them.

I’m still too scarred to be truly optimistic – thanks, Jack Z – but I’m grateful for another opening day, and another opportunity to revel in the singular awesomeness of Felix and the unique-in-sports endurance race that is baseball’s regular season. I’m looking forward to new developments in the minors as well, and reading way too much into every early-season hot start as Andy McKay and the development staff try to work their magic and undo the damage of 2014-15 on the M’s prospects.

With that, here are some other projections/pronouncements on the upcoming season:
1: Texas is good, and they’re kind of going unnoticed.
Sure, the rotation’s kind of a mess, but that’ll get better when Yu Darvish returns, and they have a bit more depth in AAA than they did last year thanks to AJ Griffin. Their bullpen’s underrated, too. It’s probably just me, but I see the potential for an absolutely elite group, and I’m trying to take comfort in the fact that the projection systems don’t see it that way.

2: Scoring will be up in 2016. By a lot.
Jeff Sullivan talked about the increase in HRs in the THT Annual, and Dave mentioned it today as well, but I think we’ve seen the peak of the pitcher era in baseball, and we’re going to see the pendulum swing back towards the batters. Dave mentions the glut of young hitting prospects hitting the league, but I think the league is going to exert some pressure on umps to halt or reverse the strikezone’s seemingly relentless move down, and make pitchers throw at or above the knee again. I think the players and especially training methods have had an impact on players ability to drive pitches. That is, slugging on contact will rise in part because teams keep acquiring George Springer-types, but also in part because they’ve gotten better about how to develop and nurture them. Finally, I think temps may be slightly higher in this El Nino year, and that’ll help the bats. Good luck, M’s bullpen.

3: The M’s 40-man roster will look very different in August
On opening day several years ago, the M’s were projected to be a bottom-feeder (they were), but they had an aging roster. That was the classic case of a team that was due for a roster shake-up. This year’s M’s are quite different – they’re a bit younger, and they’re at a different spot on the win curve. But despite all of the churn, the *way* Dipoto’s built this roster is remarkably suited to plug-and-play. If the M’s race out of the gate and look to be a playoff team, they can shop for help at the deadline and deal their prospects – the ones Dipoto didn’t draft/develop. This is what Zduriencik did upon taking over the team, after all. If they struggle, they could move Seth Smith, Norichika Aoki, whichever relievers are pitching well and perhaps Wade Miley near the deadline, when prices are highest. The team’s got several talented guys in the lower minors who ooze potential but have terrible performance records: Austin Wilson, Gareth Morgan, Alex Jackson. DJ Peterson and Tyler O’Neill are two more similar hitters who have more of a track record, as well. No matter how the big club performs, a fast start by some of those guys and the right deal on the table, and Dipoto may decide to cut bait on guys who may not be stylistic fits for the new org.

]]>3746The M’s 2016: The Upsidehttp://blog.seattlepi.com/ussmariner/2016/04/04/the-ms-2016-the-upside/
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:05:30 +0000http://www.ussmariner.com/?p=22382Opening day *should* be about optimism, and while this M’s club has some weaknesses – weaknesses we’ve spent perhaps too much time measuring/analyzing – the club is projected where it is because they’re fundamentally a good team. We’ve talked a lot about the complementary pieces, but given the roster churn, I hope we can get back to marveling at what a healthy Robinson Cano/Nelson Cruz and Felix Hernandez can do. Sure, the projections still don’t know what to make of Leonys Martin and Luis Sardinas, but through the spring, there are a number of players who could blow their projections out of the water. If a few of these happen, the M’s are a playoff team.

In last year’s article, I talked about three things: Taijuan Walker, the M’s OF, and apparent weakness in the Angels and A’s, the M’s supposed rivals. Walker disappointed a bit, his 2015 destroyed by an awful start, and the M’s *offensive* production from the OF was everything we could’ve hoped for, it just came with a side of horrific defense. The Angels and A’s did, in fact, collapse, but unfortunately the Astros and Rangers took advantage instead of the M’s. Taijuan Walker could be on this list every year; don’t take the fact that he’s not detailed below as some sort of slight. I think his ability to jump from “somewhat frustrating prospect” to “above-average MLB pitcher” is obvious, and I don’t want to rehash it every year. As I mentioned yesterday, the OF’s offense looks set to decline from 2015, but that’s by design, and it isn’t a huge problem. The big change isn’t acquiring Leonys Martin, it’s moving Nelson Cruz from RF to DH, a move that I think all of us celebrate. Getting Cruz’s offense with none of the unpleasantness of his defense? Great. So, these are the new, emerging areas for optimism – they haven’t so much erased the others as added to them.

1: Ketel Marte

Even with the SS position a bit thin, the M’s group, headed by Marte, are projected to be in the bottom half of MLB. It makes some sense: Marte’s young, has very little power, and his great 2015 call-up was propelled by patience, a skill he hadn’t really shown in the minors. Even with the big boost he gets from SS, Marte’s projected at under 2 fWAR in (mostly) full time play. Chris Taylor has been bad and is projected to remain bad, but still has a better projected OBP than Marte. So why’s Marte here, and not in the pessimistic post? Because the more you watch him, the more you start to believe that his bat-to-ball skills are as good as scouts say.

Marte’s skill set can *only* work with an elite hit tool. Not just an ability to avoid strikeouts, but an ability to hit the ball hard. This is the reason I was lower on Marte than others; I just didn’t see that kind of ability in the handful of times I saw him in Tacoma. But he followed his eye-opening 2015 with an even better spring, and he seems to be making the adjustments he needs to make. He’s gone from a guy who hit .300 by putting everything in play and running fast to a guy who’s hitting far more gaps than he did in the low minors. As a player who was often young for his league, and a player who’ll be just 22 this year, that kind of progression is great to see, and the fact that it’s been so consistent makes it less likely to be a PCL or small-sample mirage.

The SS position overall’s kind of in flux right now, as four of the top eight projected shortstops are guys with less than a year of MLB service time. The bottom of the list is dotted with a number of disappointing veterans who project even worse – Alexei Ramirez, Jonathan Villar, the over-ripe JJ Hardy, the just-happy-to-be-here Freddy Galvis. Putting that group aside, as even the projections see the Marte as superior, the more you look into it, the easier it gets to see Marte leapfrogging some of his divisional rivals, and joining his peers near the top of the rankings. Marcus Semien’s projected ahead of Marte despite his poor defense thanks largely to his power, but is it crazy to see Marte topping Semien’s projected .402 SLG%? Given the gap in contact rates, I don’t think it’s crazy at all. The Rangers second half surge last year was helped along by Elvis Andrus, who got himself off the autopsy table and started contributing again. He, too, is projected to outproduce Marte, thanks in part to superior defense. But Andrus isn’t the 10+ run-saving wizard he was five years ago, and his offense is now solidly 20% below league average. Worse, his platoon splits have become more and more obvious; his 2015 “rebound” was helped by seeing a lot more lefties than he did in 2014. He simply can’t hit righties anymore, and that makes him vulnerable in high-leverage at-bats in a way that Marte isn’t.

If he can sneak past those guys, it’s not crazy to think he could end the year as a top 10 shorstop. Fangraphs’ 8-10 are Addison Russell, Didi Gregorius and Brad Miller. Marte’s contact skills are worlds better than Russell and Miller’s, and he may hit the ball harder than Gregorius. Russell’s projection is helped by his defense – he purportedly saved over 17 runs defensively despite not playing the whole year, and Gregorius is another glove-first guy. Miller obviously lost his starting gig in Seattle thanks to defensive concerns that UZR just hasn’t seen, but he too is projected to out-defend Marte. Now: is it unreasonable to think that, if things break right, Marte could out-produce a young SS who might strike out in 30% of is plate appearances? Or the guy whose job he took six months ago? Or a no-hit SS playing in a bandbox whose projection is boosted by a one-year spike in UZR last year? I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here, but despite the M’s constant tinkering, shortstop was never really a problematic position for the M’s. It’s not projected to be one this year. But the M’s – and Marte – seem like they could be on the cusp of making it a real competitive advantage for years.

The obvious, obvious counterpoint to all of this is that M’s fans know better than anyone that a solid half-season call-up does not a future all-star make. From Willie Bloomquist to Jeremy Reed to Dustin Ackley to Brad Miller, the M’s have seen quite a few players impress in their first tour of the majors and then never reach that level of production again. What separates Marte from Chris Taylor or Ackley? This is where Marte’s abilty to square up tough pitches, and plus velocity, becomes important. Reed and Ackley took plenty of walks in the minors, but couldn’t consistently translate that to the majors. Ackley in particular can look extremely similar to Marte: in 2013, Ackley hit grounders about 50% of the time, kept his K’s under 20% and had a solid but not great walk rate. That 88 wRC+ is essentially dead on Marte’s projection. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, given Marte’s position, but if we learned anything from Ackley’s time in Seattle, it’s that not all grounders are created equal.

Last year, Ackley hit over half of the balls in play tracked by Statcast between 80-100 MPH. He hit .200 on those balls-in-play. Just under half of Marte’s balls-in-play fell into this mid-range, 80-100mph zone, but Marte’s speed produced a .360 BABIP on them (it helps that, as a switch hitter, Marte wasn’t hitting every grounder to second base). Ackley’s over-100mph balls-in-play jumped markedly after his trade to NY, so they both look good on that score, but the point is that *even if his batted ball profile doesn’t change* Marte can wring more value out of it than Ackley.

2: Nate Karns

Karns won the 5th spot in the rotation almost by default, as James Paxton looked off throughout the spring. That said, as a guy coming off a sneaky-good 2015, he gives the M’s rotation the potential to easily surpass their already-good projections. 5th starters aren’t generally workhorses, and Karns only tossed 147 IP for the Rays, the team that let their starters pitch the fewest the innings last year. But it’s not just that Karns’ rate stats look a bit low, it’s that he’s only projected for 130 IP. Give him 160-180, and you’ve got a 5th starter creeping up on league average.

Of course, if that was his upside, I probably wouldn’t highlight him here. Luckily, I don’t think that’s his ceiling. Anyone who combines a high strikeout rate with some tantalizing signs of being able to ‘beat’ FIP through strand rate and BABIP has the potential to add real value. Karns high-fastball and improving change-up mean he doesn’t have the platoon split worries that many pitchers face. Over his career, he’s actually been better against lefties than righties. When he’s been hurt, it’s been against right-handers.* The M’s know that there are several things that jump out as regression candidates here: first, those reverse platoon splits should be regressed, and then his HR/FB ratio, particularly against righties, may come down as well. Just do the latter and it essentially accomplishes the former, after all. A version of Nate Karns with strikeouts and a better SLG%-against versus righties starts to look pretty good.

The other big factor affecting Karns’ home run rate is his home park. Just as with the relievers the M’s acquired, Karns’ elevated HR-rate figures to drop if only because he’s moving from a solid hitter’s park in a hitter-friendly division to a pitcher’s park on the marine layered west coast. If that was the only thing happening, it’d help. But I hope Karns takes it a step further, and uses Safeco to build confidence in throwing the ball up in the zone. Here’s how Karns has used his fastball against right-handers. Plenty of elevated four-seamers, but there are a lot of low and away and low-middle pitches, too. Now take a look at the average batted-ball speed by location for Karns, courtesy of Baseball Savant:
I’m not suggesting Karns should abandon the low strike entirely, but Karns’ movement and his new home park are tailor-made to just target the top of the zone or above it like Chris Young. Let the curve ball do the work low in the zone – it’ll be harder to pick up, and batters hit the curve softer than they hit his fastball last year anyway.

Another thing that’s preventing Karns from making the leap to middle-of-the-rotation workhorse, it’s his control. While his K/9 sits among some elite pitchers, his walks/9 sticks out as a problem. Could Safeco help with that as well? Maybe, but this may just be a part of his game going forward, or he may not be able to materially improve his walk rate without a corresponding increase in homers. Luckily, there are a few examples of pitchers who’ve become very good starters with similar K and BB numbers. Lance Lynn of the Cardinals posted a 22.2% K rate and a 9.1% BB rate last year. Karns’ numbers, in the American League, mind you, were 23.4% and 9.0%, respectively. Lynn, a fastball-heavy pitcher without much of a change-up, has big platoon splits as well. He’s been effective despite of these red flags by keeping his strand rate high. Part of that may be whatever Cardinals devil magic allowed their BABIP to tumble with runners in scoring position, but part of it seems to be a choice not to give in to hitters: Lynn’s K rate AND walk rate rose with RISP. Hector Santiago has a similar arsenal to Karns, and has carved out a nice little career posting consistently low ERAs and ugly FIPs thanks to a combo of walks and homers. Santiago’s strategy with men on is essentially the same as Lynn’s: his walk rate gets close to 5 per 9IP with RISP, but his BABIP collapses at the same time, leading to a lot of stranded runners. Karns’ strand rate was in the same range as Santiago and Lynn last year, and again, his home park may make it easier for him to target the top of the zone with RISP where BABIP is lower and whiffs higher than the center or bottom of the zone. Santiago was worth 2.5 fielding dependent WAR last year, while Lynn added 3.6 (and over 4 in 2014), so this seems like a fairly easy path to middle-of-the-rotation success for Karns.

3: The Astros Have Breakout Potential and Weaknesses in Roughly Equal Measure

The Astros have Carlos Correa, the best projected SS in baseball, and a lot of talent in the upper minors to boot. They’re the favorites for a reason, and they look likely to be the favorites for years and years, considering the age of their core: Correa is 21, Jose Altuve is not yet 26, George Springer is 26, and Dallas Keuchel is an old man at 28. It should be easy to build around a core like that, and as last year’s remarkable run showed, they’ve proven fairly adept at that. Still, it’s not like they’ve built a juggernaut. There’s a reason their projections are just a tiny bit better than the M’s, and they’ve got concerns sprinkled around their 25-man roster.

Their catching group is headed up by Jason Castro, a 28 year old who’s essentially been the starter since 2012. He came through the minors as a guy with great patience and enough contact skills to be a real asset at the plate, and while he wasn’t exactly good in his debut year of 2010, he posted a solid walk rate and a K rate under 20%. Improve the BABIP, and you’d have something. After losing a year to injury, that’s what Castro did: an improved BABIP led to a nearly league-average line in 2011, and if the Ks crept up, they were still well under control. In 2013, Castro appeared to break out – trading lots more Ks for lots more pop, his overall line was about 30% *better* than the league average. Since then, though, Castro has collapsed. Last year, his K rate soared to over 30%, and his production has tumbled to the point where he’s now about as far below league average as he was above it in 2013. As anyone who watched Mike Zunino (or JP Arencibia) knows, aging curves are different for different players, and the Astros can’t just assume Castro’s offense will bounce back.

The Astros had a great catcher in the low-minors who posted a breakout season last year, but they ended up trading him to Oakland in the Scott Kazmir deal (Oakland then swapped him for Khris Davis). Nottingham will start the year in AA and could theoretically see the Majors this year for the rebuilding Brewers. He’d look great as insurance for Castro. As it is, the Astros just traded for veteran back-up Erik Kratz, a 35 year old who hasn’t posted an OBP over .280 since 2012. If Castro continues to slide, there’s just not much the Astros can do to staunch the bleeding. Their top C prospect is Alfredo Gonzalez, who broke out across three levels last year, but Gonzalez was mediocre-to-average for four years prior to that, and in any event doesn’t crack the Astros top 20 prospects.

For a team that hit so well, the Astros have really struggled to get even adequate production out of 1B and DH. The M’s know all about that, of course, but it’s odd given that the Astros can find 20 year old shortstops with power to spare, or get a bunch of HRs out of ex-2B prospect Luis Valbuena. But while Chris Carter had his moments with Houston, the Astros let him walk and turned over their 1B job to Jon Singleton. Singleton face-planted in 2014, and has done everything in his power to turn the job down. The Astros depth at 1B is much, much better than it is at catcher, so this doesn’t seem like a big problem at first. The Astros plan is to have Tyler White start, and if he fails, they’ll give it to top prospect AJ Reed.

White’s an interesting prospect, as he’s a low draft pick who’s destroyed minor league pitching at every level, but he’s never been seen as a top prospect. Part of the problem has been his age-relative-to-league, but the biggest red flag is his lack of home run power. White’s walked more than he’s struck out, and he’s hit enough doubles to post great wRC+ at every level of the minors, so many Astros fans believe the 1B position will be a strength starting today. But as August Fagerstrom wrote about at Fangraphs, this player type – the high BB, gap hitting, low-HR 1B – has an awfully high bust potential. Anyone who cut their prospecting teeth in the years following Money Ball’s publication can probably rattle off the names Fagerstrom pulls up: Daric Barton was a can’t miss, big-league hitter for the A’s, until he did in fact miss. Dan Johnson seemed even more similar to White, and he’s now a knuckleball pitcher. Justin Smoak was a heralded prospect, and his minor league lines are somewhat similar, though White’s been better overall. Clint Robinson mashed in the KC system, and had plenty more power than White, but hasn’t really been able to get a major league job.

The name I thought of that surprisingly wasn’t on the list was another ex-KC 1B, a name familiar to anyone following the minors 10 years ago: Kila Ka’aihue. Ka’aihue had more power, but was known most of all for his walk rate. White’s 12-17% walk rates are elite, no doubt, but Ka’aihue posted *20%* walk rates in both AA and AAA. White walked more than he K’d at AA, but Ka’aihue had TWICE as many walks as Ks at the same level. Given an (overdue) shot in 2010 with the Royals, Ka’aihue just failed to hit despite a decent K:BB ratio. Maybe White is more Olerud than Ka’aihue, but even Olerud needed an adjustment period (it didn’t help that he went straight from WSU to the majors, of course). White’s stats and major league equivalencies are great, but not swinging at anything except middle-middle pitches works wonders in the minors and just doesn’t work as well in the AL.

Meanwhile, the Astros grabbed Evan Gattis to be their DH, then watched him get off to a horrendous start. He improved down the stretch (while his teammates imploded), but has suffered through injuries this spring, and will begin the year on the disabled list. Preston Tucker may start the year as the DH, and while Tucker was league average at the plate last year, he’s projected to be a replacement level DH this year. If Gattis’ injuries linger, this could become a problem. Sure, everyone expects AJ Reed to hit the moment he arrives, but he can’t play two positions, and top prospects often need a while to get established (okay, sure, Correa sure didn’t). These aren’t huge flaws for the Astros, but they’re weaknesses, and with the M’s so close in true talent, neither team may be able to survive a 2-3 WAR under-performance.

Let’s go M’s.

* This is similar to James Paxton, who’s seen line-ups stacked with righties even as he’s *struggled* against lefties.

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]]>3747The M’s 2016 : The Riskshttp://blog.seattlepi.com/ussmariner/2016/04/03/the-ms-2016-the-risks/
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 03:56:55 +0000http://www.ussmariner.com/?p=22379The M’s open the season tomorrow against Texas, the start of a long season in an AL West that’s almost unrecognizable from last year. Houston’s *good* now? Texas can win despite an ongoing injury plague of biblical proportions? Los Angeles is…well, actually, they look pretty bad at the moment, but we’ll get to that in the optimistic post. Despite the roster churn, despite the fact that there isn’t a really bad club in the division (or maybe the League), despite last year’s disappointments, the M’s are in a pretty good position. The projection systems all have them a few wins above .500 in a very tightly packed race, and that means the M’s playoff odds aren’t bad. With an aging but still elite core, the team could very easily blow those projections out of the water. But any M’s fan who’s been paying attention for a year or more knows that risks are always lurking. Last year, I ran delved into a few of those risks, including regression by Mike Zunino and a bad bullpen, and, well, those risks kind of killed the team. I am quite confident that lightning won’t strike twice, and I look forward to laughing about these in August. For a team that’s undergone as much turnover as the 2016 M’s, the same issues won’t crop up again. R…right?

Last year’s risks were a disparate grouping of things, from Mike Zunino’s plate discipline to Austin Jackson’s aging to bullpen regression. There really wasn’t a common theme tying them together. This year, I see the same basic issue with all of them; they’re all different iterations of the same basic problem. That problem can be stated rather bluntly: many of the players the M’s brought in around their core were terrible last year. If you’re economically minded, you can talk about buy-low candidates, or the benefits of regression. Finance types might talk about undervalued assets. If you’re sabermetrically inclined, Fangraphs will give several reasons for hope: an absurd HR:FB ratio, a FIP lower than an ERA, a batter whose line doesn’t fit with his batted ball ratio, an aching wrist, etc. There are plenty of ways to couch and caveat the central truth here, but that truth is rather troubling for a contending ballclub: the M’s went out and acquired players who sucked in 2015.

1: The Bullpen

Last year, the M’s bullpen was actually *supposed* to be good. Well, they were supposed to be in the top half anyway, after a surprisingly good 2014. That didn’t happen, obviously, and thus it’s the bullpen that’s seen the most turnover. Of the top 10 in projected IP last year, only Charlie Furbush and David Rollins are still with the club, and the former’s on the DL and the latter’s in the minors. Fernando Rodney was DFA’d, Carson Smith, Yoervis Medina, Tyler Olson, Danny Farquhar, Tom Wilhelmsen and Dom Leone were all traded, and Lucas Luetge was essentially waived. The M’s were able to restock through trades, free agency and the like, and a clear pattern’s emerged: the M’s have tried to acquire guys with clear skills and…spotty performance records.

Evan Scribner posted a brilliant K:BB ratio but gave up plenty of runs thanks to a barrage of HRs. Ryan Cook’s season was mercifully cut short as he tried to come back from injury. Nick Vincent was felled by shoulder trouble and a ridiculous BABIP. Joel Peralta had a low-key version of Evan Scribner’s year on his way to a sub-replacement-level campaign for the Dodgers. Steve Cishek’s control left him, and the same overall contact rate as he’s always allowed somehow produced far fewer strikeouts. Again, there are clear and easy sabermetric reasons to bet on improvement, but even WITH regression, the M’s bullpen’s projected to be the worst in the AL.* If that’s anywhere close to true, the M’s are going to find it hard to beat back the Astros and hold off the Rangers. Last year, Oakland had a great run differential through the first half and a terrible, terrible record thanks to their bullpen. No one’s forecasting the kind of horrific luck or historically bad performance that befouled the Coliseum to happen to the M’s, but it’s an example of how important a bullpen can be to a team’s success.

It’s a measure of how consistently the M’s have opted for bounce-back guys that the exception to this rule is Joaquin Benoit, who’ll turn 39 this year (while Peralta will be 40). Surrounding these newbies are what passes for home-grown talent around here – two guys the M’s acquired last year: Tony Zych and Mike Montgomery. Zych’s coming off a shocking, out-of-nowhere 2015, in which he went from minor league cast-off who was literally acquired for a dollar to potential set-up man with a 96mph fastball and hellish slider. That sounds great, and it is, but of course Zych was sold for $1 for a reason: he was awful in AA in 2014, and his AAA stat line shows that his 2015 major league call-up may have been a bit lucky. Optimists may say Zych’s K% rise from 2014 and from AA to AAA to the big leagues as the product of mechanical changes, a change in mental outlook, or what have you. Pessimists might point out that relievers who dazzle in less-than-20 IP samples are more common than you’d think. Montgomery was a starter whose performance fell off badly in the second half, and has been moved to the bullpen by necessity; he’s out of options, and probably wouldn’t have made it through waivers. Thus, the fastball-change-up specialist, the guy with large reverse platoon splits, will be the second lefty in the pen and will get to face left-handed bats despite not having an average or plus pitch to throw at them.

Every bullpen is volatile, and given the M’s needs at other positions and costs tied up in Cano/Cruz/Felix/Iwakuma, it probably makes some sense to go bargain shopping in the bullpen. But there’s hoping for regression, and there’s identifying and correcting flaws. From the outside, we just have to hope that the M’s are doing some of the latter. The singular focus on the park and a specific *kind* of regression – that is, counting on lowered HR rates going forward – makes me wonder, though. Steve Cishek, the M’s anointed closer, has essentially average GB rates. Behind him, the M’s are absolutely stacked with rising-fastball guys with ground ball percentages in the low-30s. Vidal Nuno, Scribner, Benoit, Vincent, Peralta – they’re all career 33-36% GB guys. The only potential GB guy is Tony Zych, who simply hasn’t thrown enough to know for sure. Who do they go to if they need a ground ball in a key situation in the 7th? Just bring in Cishek? Zych, even if the batter’s a lefty? Nuno? You look down at AAA, and outside of Donn Roach, it’s the same thing: Jonathan Aro, Cody Martin, Joe Weiland are all high-FB, low ground ball pitchers. Last year, the M’s hoped their park (and the other AL West venues) would help their pen avoid HR troubles, but that hope was dashed. The new GM has changed out nearly the entire pen for guys who gave up even *more* HRs. The new Safeco isn’t some instant fix for players with gopher ball problems. Yeah, you say, but HRs can’t stay high forever, right? Except that they grew league-wide last year (and this spring!), and despite the true-in-the-aggregate nostrum that HR:FB ratios tend to average out, some players give up lots of HRs because they throw bad pitches. Fingers crossed, M’s fans.

2: The Catcher spot

Last year, M’s catchers “hit” .160/.208/.259, as Mike Zunino imploded and the M’s had to turn to perhaps the most purely defensive catcher in decades, Jesus Sucre. Let’s be clear here: the M’s catchers will be better, because that 2015 line is mind-bendingly bad. The former FO should’ve been fired for that alone. Anyway, Jerry Dipoto wisely saw that an upgrade at catcher could help transform the offense and might not cost a lot. So, he went and got Chris Iannetta, his hand-picked C in Anaheim, and a guy he’d helped draft in Colorado. Iannetta’s walk rate alone makes him an attractive option at the plate, but Iannetta’s got enough power that pitchers can’t just throw down the middle. So far, so good, but Iannetta, who’ll turn 33 next week, is coming off a line of .188/.293/.335 line, good for an 80 wRC+.

As with the relievers, there’s a clear, sabermetric-101 explanation here. Iannetta’s awful average on balls in play helped push his average – and thus his line – south of the Mendoza line. Still: Iannetta’s a catcher in his mid-30s. His career BABIP wasn’t exactly good, and it’s projected to be just below .270, which has his average down in the .210 range. Thanks to his walk rate, Iannetta’s average matters less than it does for most players (and that’s a low bar to begin with), but a low average nukes some of the value of that patience. A sub .300 OBP is bad, whether it’s from an over-praised .280 swing-at-anything hitter or a patient-but-declining catcher with a 12% walk rate.

Iannetta is used to spacious home parks, but that doesn’t mean he’s thrived in them. He had large home/road splits last year, performing poorly at home and better on the road. Even in his very good 2014, he struck out more at home, and had a better overall line on the road – a kind of cosmic payback for his years at altitude, I guess. Of course, performing worse in a pitcher’s park is to be expected, and given the overall run environment, doesn’t really matter. But last year makes you wonder if he’s the kind of hitter who needs an architectural thumb on the scale.

The BABIP of .225 can’t last, but then you notice that his fly ball rate spiked and his hard contact rate hit its lowest level since he was a rookie and you start to wonder how much of this “fluke” was equal parts “aging” and “change in approach.” Again, the M’s are saying all the right things about development and coaching at the big league level, and having a former player development chief as the field manager could work. But M’s fans have seen how catchers can fall off a cliff – Miguel Olivo was solid, then awful-and-a-Mariner, then league average, then awful-and-a-Mariner again and then his career as a full-time C was over. Kelly Shoppach was clearly a poor man’s Chris Iannetta and looked like another savvy buy-low pick-up until he cratered and, like Olivo, never got another shot.

Luckily, the M’s got a back-up that’d enable Mike Zunino to spend a year in AAA and really work on his swing. Whatever happens this year, that’s a great move. What made it possible was acquiring Steve Clevenger from Baltimore. Clevenger’s not a defender, which has really hurt his chances of earning a full-time gig. He’s been a back up for the Cubs and Orioles, and unfortunately for him, failed repeatedly in small call-ups. Last year was his best year by far (why on earth was HE targeted, Jerry?), but he still put up a below-average line in 100 or so PAs. In the minors, the ex-infielder showed Iannetta-like patience, but in the majors, it’s been accompanied by Iannetta-in-2015 averages, which has sunk his value. Last year, his overall line was much better, but he didn’t walk *at all* – his BB% collapsed to under 4%. If this new approach works better, that’s fine. But let’s be clear: the back-up to a 33-year old Chris Iannetta, coming off an 80 wRC+, is a 30 year old (hey, happy birthday, Steve!) career back-up who’s hit .228/.280/.327 over more-or-less one full season. That that’s better than what Sucre would give you doesn’t matter. Kind of like the bullpen, if we look back at another smoking crater of a catcher position, it’ll be hard to be too surprised. 33 year old starter, untested back-up, Mike Zunino. If it works, it’s great, but everyone knows there’s collapse potential here.

3: Center Field

Leonys Martin’s floor is higher than the other two risks thanks to his defense. His glove (and, really, his arm) is good enough that the M’s can carry his bat because he’ll be saving runs for the pitching staff no matter what he does at the plate. But again, this is the same reasoning that kept a traumatized Mike Zunino in the line-up. Martin had several ailments that, in part, explain his putrid line of .219/.264/.313, but this is the player – ailments and all – that the M’s have entrusted their CF spot to. The M’s got almost nothing from center fielders in 2014, and they nearly made the playoffs – a good line-up can carry a bad spot, especially at a premium defensive position. But given the risks elsewhere, it’d be nice if they didn’t have to.

Martin’s collapse in 2015 followed a solid 2014. Unlike Iannetta, though, that “peak” wasn’t very high. Martin hit .275/.325/.364, which, when you play half your games in Arlington, is only worth an 89 wRC+. The larger problem is that the power he showed – at times – in Cuba and in his early years with Texas has dried up. To be clear, a worse-than-average hitter can still be valuable, as we’ve seen with Kevin Kiermaier in Tampa, or Martin in 2014. But after posting ISO-power in the .130 range, he’s been under .100 for two straight seasons. In Arlington. Moving to Seattle is certainly not going to help that, and while healing his wrist might, it’s certainly odd that his *lowest* ISO came in his “good” 2014 campaign.

And that brings us to defense, that skill that seems the least likely to suffer slumps, but also the one we know the least about identifying and measuring. Martin’s been one of the best defenders for a few years, but there’s something odd about many public measures of defense, especially for team switchers. Shane Victorino was an average defender in Philadelphia, then, if you believe UZR, one of the best in baseball for Boston in 2013, and then below average after that. Martin’s teammate David Murphy had a very solid 2013, then instantly became one of the league’s worst offenders after moving to Cleveland. Michael Bourn: very good with Houston, great with Atlanta, and then instantly terrible with Cleveland. Yunel Escobar was great early on, then had two diametrically opposed years with Tampa before an awful one in DC. Chase Headley was awful in San Diego and great in New York, etc. There’s no rhyme or reason here, and this is obviously not a scientific study, but it’s not *obviously* random. Each park has its unique wind patterns, layout and sight lines; one really could become an expert in knowing how a ball will move in one park and be a step behind in another. This is important, because Martin’s value is so, so dependent on his defense, and there’s just not much depth behind him.

Boog Powell’s an intriguing prospect, but when so many scouts give him the 4th OF tag, it’s clear he’s not going to start the year in AAA because of service time concerns. He’s got a bit more to prove, especially after a moderately disappointing 2015. He had nowhere to play in Tampa, and getting him in the Nate Karns/Brad Miller swap was exactly what the M’s needed. But while the walk rate means his margin for error is larger, the lack of power means it may not play in the majors (ask Steve Clevenger).

The M’s CFs don’t have to be good. They’re projected as a bottom-half group – about where the M’s have been projected in recent years. But just as the M’s didn’t wring a lot of “but regression!” out of Austin Jackson, they can’t bank on the 2 or so fWAR Martin’s projected for, either. Safeco can be a tough hitting environment – for the bullpen’s sake, let’s hope it is – and it’s tough to ask a guy coming off a horrendous year mentally and physically to make some necessary improvements in the thick of the marine layer. This situation is a bit different from the previous two, in that a 28 year old starter and a near-ready 23 year old prospect and perhaps an out-of-position Norichika Aoki just doesn’t scream “collapse,” but the M’s could really use some production here. Austin Jackson wasn’t awful last year, but he was bad enough that he provoked some panic in the M’s, leading to the ill-advised move of Brad Miller to the OF (and Ketel Marte to CF in Tacoma, albeit briefly). I think Dipoto’s hand will be a bit steadier on the tiller, but this is the full, terrible lesson that certain Mariners teams seem born to teach: each individual failing cascades and multiplies, like the butterfly effect but for dung beetles, and it takes bystanders, seasons, and contention windows with it.

It probably won’t be that bad, but I don’t think I need to remind you that it was, in fact, that bad in 2015. To turning over new leaves! Go M’s!

* Thanks to late-breaking trades and injuries, the M’s have crept above the Tigers in the most recent projections. Onward and upward!

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]]>3745Welcome, Nick Vincenthttp://blog.seattlepi.com/ussmariner/2016/04/02/welcome-nick-vincent/
Sat, 02 Apr 2016 23:00:59 +0000http://www.ussmariner.com/?p=22374It’s not technically the final roster decision – the M’s haven’t announced the winner of the back-up catcher competition, but it’s going to be Steve Clevenger – but the M’s solidified their bullpen by trading for ex-Padres righty Nick Vincent a few days ago. The M’s and Pads had been negotiating about a few relievers, including Vincent and fellow RHP Kevin Quackenbush,* and the M’s finally pulled the trigger on a trade for Vincent, sending a PTBNL to San Diego.

There’s a lot to like in Vincent’s stat lines. In 150 innings, he’s racked up 161 against only 39 walks, and has a career ERA and FIP in the mid 2′s. That’s not bad for a late-Spring guy who was acquired for a PTBNL and was in serious danger of needing to pass through waivers (Vincent’s out of options). Why would the Padres move a cheap, effective reliever? Well, for one, Vincent’s essentially a righty specialist. Not that he’s necessarily been used that way, but few players have the kind of platoon splits that Vincent shown. There are positives and negatives there, of course – he’s struggled against lefties, with a middling K:BB ratio against them and a FIP over 4. On the other hand, he’s been really, freakishly good against righties. His career K:BB against righties is an Evan Scribner-like 113:12, and they’ve managed just 3 HRs (sure, Petco helps, but that’s still pretty amazing). If you’re going to carry a specialist, you need them to be *dominant* at their specialty, and Vincent meets that test. Besides, there’s always a chance, however slim, that a guy manages to escape ROOGY jail and become an all-around shut-down reliever – this is what Darren O’Day managed, and Vincent’s four-seam fastball has eerily similar results to O’Day’s against righties.

The other big red flag with Vincent has been health. He’s missed time with a forearm strain and, last year, shoulder pain. Neither required surgery, but they limited his IP and sound a bit worrying. The injuries sapped his effectiveness and velocity a bit, which is how a guy who’d averaged over 1 full fWAR per year in 2013-14 spent most of last year in the minor leagues. That velocity is somewhat important, because Vincent has very little margin for error. You’d think a guy throwing 90mph with shockingly bland movement would either be a ground-ball guy and/or some kind of side-arming Sean Green slider machine. That’s not Vincent, though. Vincent has a normal 3/4 release point, and essentially dead-on average movement from his four-seam fastball and his bread and butter, a hard cutter at 87-88. His best pitch, results wise, is his fastball, which he throws up in the zone, resulting in lots of fly balls. Essentially, Vincent is a relief version of Chris Young, without the freakish height or ‘rise’ on his fastball.

The sheer averageness of his fastball becomes oddly fascinating the more you really think about it. Chris Young has carved out a career defying FIP by limiting his HR/FB. It’s weird, but not THAT weird, because his fastball’s designed to get a certain kind of contact. Vincent’s got the Young-esque HR/FB (Vincent’s 5.3% is lower than Young’s career 8.1%), but also gets swings and misses, which means he settles back into good-FIP territory. One difference is that Young has to do his high-wire act against lefties and righties alike. Vincent’s line, and all of that Chris Young magic, is partly the result of his usage. Against lefties, Vincent’s HR/FB starts to look normal, and his K:BB (and FIP) edge closer to replacement level. But as I said before, that just highlights how *good* he’s been righties.

I’ve mentioned it many times in the past few years, but moving to the AL West is a real test for platoon-plagued immigrants from the National League. He may face a few more lefties than he did in his brilliant 2014 campaign, as he faces the A’s and Astros mix-and-match line-ups. That said, I wonder if we’ve reached peak platoon in the AL. Many of the great young stars entering the league – Carlos Correa, Mookie Betts, Miguel Sano – are right-handed, and the league’s best hitters include righties like Trout, Donaldson, Bautista, and Cabrera. The M’s could *use* a shut-down righty. If Vincent stays healthy, he could help the M’s in critical situations. There aren’t that many out-of-options, 90mph-fastball, sent-to-the-minors last year, injury-plagued players you can say that about.

* Hat tip to Zach Sanders, who called this on twitter. I thought Dipoto might prefer Quackenbush, whose repertoire fits the Scribner/Joel Peralta mold that the M’s seem to like – extreme vertical movement on the fastball, 12-6 curve. Quackenbush even has a Peralta-esque splitter. The M’s ended up with Vincent, though, and price may have played a big part there – Quackenbush has been healthier. Of course, Dipoto’s clearly jumped at high-fly ball rate guys coming off down years, and that may have mattered more than the pitch-fx fit – it probably made Vincent cheaper.

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]]>3744M’s Set Roster, Choose Volatility over Predictabilityhttp://blog.seattlepi.com/ussmariner/2016/03/28/ms-set-roster-choose-volatility-over-predictability/
Mon, 28 Mar 2016 19:30:43 +0000http://www.ussmariner.com/?p=22372Today’s roster moves essentially confirm what the news of the weekend strongly implied: Dae Ho Lee will be the right-handed partner at 1B for Adam Lind, while SS/Util Luis Sardinas will take the 25th spot on the bench while Chris Taylor heads to Tacoma for some seasoning and plate appearances. Moreover, James Paxton will officially be rotation depth, and Nate Karns will start the year in the 5th spot in the starting rotation.

To be clear: these decisions shouldn’t make or break Seattle’s season. That these are some of the *last* roster decisions is indicative both of their importance (meh) and the fact that the M’s were deciding between very similar players. Jesus Montero vs. Dae Ho Lee looked like a toss-up, because they’re similarly skilled – and similarly limited – players; it looked like a toss-up, because, statistically, it was. But to me, the decisions the M’s have made increase the volatility of the roster – they have increased their ceiling, and may have dropped their floor a bit. For a team like the Mariners, chasing a good Houston club and trying to fend off the Rangers, that’s the right decision.

We’ve talked about it before, but for pretty obvious reasons, the M’s enter 2016 neither rebuilding or pushing all-in for the playoffs. Jerry Dipoto’s made a lot of moves, but they’ve been a bit more marginal than the ones in, say, Atlanta or Boston, because the M’s core is set and because they’re relatively close to contention. Selling low on Robbie Cano or selling high on Nelson Cruz wouldn’t bring back enough to justify the damage to their 2016 playoff chances, and pushing for David Price would further concentrate the M’s payroll in a handful of over-30 stars. Dipoto’s moves to shore up the catcher, first base and outfield show a GM determined to avoid the black holes that have nuked recent M’s offenses. With these last few moves, though, Jerry’s seemingly decided to amp up the risk/reward a bit. While the difference is somewhat small, we know more about Jesus Montero’s MLB ability than we do about Dae Ho Lee’s. That’s not to say Dae Ho Lee is a husky tabula rasa, but the error bars are a bit wider. Is it possible that Lee can’t adjust to good breaking stuff, or that lefties with plus velo eat him up?* Yes, that’s possible. But it’s *also* possible that Lee absolutely mashes lefties and makes the M’s offense a lefty-killing powerhouse.

The same’s true at SS. Chris Taylor, thanks to some good minor league batting lines and a strong MLB debut in 2014, has better projections than Luis Sardinas, who was just awful last year. That said, Sardinas is both younger and was seen as a big-time prospect not that long ago. So is this a case of Scott Servais picking someone he’d worked with before over the boring-but-steady Taylor? Maybe not. While you don’t want to put too much stock in spring performances, Sardinas showed more pop than he has in the past, and he’s at an age when an increase in ISO seems more reasonable and less Arizona mirage. Moreover, he’s demonstrated an ability to play more positions, like CF, than Taylor. I’ve been a fan of Taylor’s for years, and yes, last year at this time I was excoriating the M’s for carrying Willie Bloomquist over Chris Taylor. But with a clear contender in a tightly-bunched AL, the M’s had a different set of incentives. This year, the M’s aren’t the AL West favorite, and given the roster turnover (and front office turnover), what they really need more than anything is to know where they stand come July. If Lee/Sardinas/Karns help propel the team to contention, that’s great, then they can decide how to acquire more talent for the stretch run. If the newbies struggle, or if the rotation scuffles (which Jeff at Fangraphs points out is a real worry), then they can make some moves aimed more at 2017-18.

We’re used to seeing non-contenders opt for volatile line-ups of prospects and flawed-but-intriguing players – think Houston in recent years, or Atlanta now – but by concentrating that volatility in back-up spots, the back of the rotation and the middle of the bullpen, the M’s may have found a way to get some of the benefits of volatility while minimizing the 110-loss downside we normally think about with rebuilding teams. The focus of the 2016 M’s is the same as it was for the 2015 M’s, and it’ll likely be the same in 2017: The M’s are still fundamentally about Felix, Nelson, and Robinson. But for a team that’s been absolutely destroyed by its lack of depth and lack of bench production, I kind of like this strategy, even if it blows up on them.**

* This is probably nothing, but I think it’s kind of interesting that many players with NPB/KBO experience don’t have the same platoon splits you see in other players. Ichiro famously hit lefties better than righties, and Norichika Aoki’s done the same, albeit in a much smaller sample. The right-handed Jung-Ho Kang mashed *righties* but struggled against lefties last year. The sample of such players is already small, and many (like Kang) haven’t had long MLB careers, so there’s nothing definitive here, but it’s kind of interesting.

** That’s not to say we should rejoice at the evident end of the Jesus Montero era here. Yes, the trade turned out awful, and yes, Montero absolutely shares some of the blame for that. But Montero’s failure was a text-book example of the M’s player development issues, and highlight the fact that the black holes at pre-Nelson Cruz DH/1B/C were not simply a product of awful pro scouting (“let’s give Miguel Olivo another starting gig!”) but of a profound inability to teach. I hope the M’s will be better at this going forward, and I also hope Montero finds an org with good teachers and has something of a career.

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Today’s game is a great pitching match-up between an NPB vet who’s made about as smooth a transition to MLB as possible, and another former NPB star who’s looking to do the same. It’s reductive and not-exactly-accurate to say they’re similar pitchers, as they’ve shown a different repertoire with differing strengths and weaknesses, but I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch and see if Maeda patterns his game more on ‘Kuma as the Spring or the 2016 season rolls along.

In NPB, Maeda was a fastball/slider/change guy, whose slider was seen as his best pitch. Iwakuma’s amazing splitter really is one of the best pitches in baseball, and it’s made up for his sub-standard fastball velocity and so-so slider. Of course, in Japan, Iwakuma was often seen as a fastball/slider guy, and it seems he’s ramped up his splitter usage in America. That’s the same pattern we saw with Masahiro Tanaka, too. The splitter is so important because batters swing at it – it’s not something you use to freeze a hitter and get a called strike, the way you might with a curve. It’s designed to be swung at, even more than sliders, and what’s important is that contact isn’t a bad thing. Iwakuma’s biggest skill, and it’s something we’ve talked about a lot around here, is that batters swing at – and make contact on – pitches below the strike zone. That boosts Kuma’s GB%, but more importantly, it’s allowed him to post a consistently-low BABIP. Remember, grounders go for hits more often than outfield fly balls, so if anything, you’d expect a low BABIP from fly-ball guys like Chris Young. But Kuma and Dallas Keuchel seem to have figured out how to induce weaker contact, and while they use different pitches to do it, the game plan is pretty clear: get hitters to swing at non-strikes and good things will happen.

Maeda’s change has some split-like movement, so it’ll be interesting to see if he starts throwing it a lot more, or if he’ll stick with the approach that worked so well for him in Japan.

Ex-Mariner Chone Figgins signed a one-day deal with Anaheim and officially retired today. I love the restraint in the last sentence of Bob Dutton’s piece about it here.

Donn Roach will throw an inning or two in this game. With some of the righties in the pen hurting, Roach still has a sliver of an opportunity to make the opening day roster. The club clearly likes Blake Parker, who’s pitched well overall, but scuffled in his last appearance. Roach had a disastrous appearance early in camp, but was throwing very well a week or so ago. Not sure if he missed time with the flu that still infecting M’s (Guti’s the latest victim) or what.

A couple of other candidates for a bullpen job were among the 5 cuts the M’s made yesterday. Ryan Divish reports Jonathan Aro, Adrian Sampson and David Rollins were, as expected, sent to minor league camp, along with Steve Baron and Ed Lucas.

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Happy Felix Day. Hopefully, Taijuan Walker takes another step towards some sort of royal title today – not Prince, not yet, at least, but Duke, Viscount or Satrap. Walker faces the Royals, in a rematch of a game back on the 9th of March, when Walker faced off with Matt Strahm. In that game, Strahm threw four-seam fastballs on 41 of his 47 total pitches. We’ll see if he’s as predictable as that again, or if that game was about building arm strength. Walker was magnificent in that contest, using his curve ball for strikes, hitting 98 with his fastball and getting 5 whiffs on the 5 splitters he threw. Sure, Drew Butera of all people hit a HR, but that game was as good as any appearance we’ve seen this spring.

Strahm isn’t fighting for a spot on the World Series champion Royals – he’s already been optioned to AA. That’s not a surprise or anything, as Strahm pitched last year in high-A. The Royals have to like what they’ve seen, though. As a 21st round pick, he racked up Ks in the minors with a sneaky, running 91mph fastball and a curve. Despite the arm-side run, there’s really nothing in the velo or movement that screams “difficult to hit” so it’s got to be encouraging to see him miss a few bats and induce a flurry of ground balls in the Cactus League.

In the nightcap, King Felix takes the hill against Tyler Wagner. Wagner was a college closer, but converted to the rotation when he was drafted by the Brewers. He came over to Arizona in the Jean Segura/Aaron Hill/Chase Anderson deal this off-season. The sinkerballer was someone I mentioned a bit in the minor league recaps last year, as he shot through the Brewers system and ended up making a couple of appearances for Milwaukee late last year. He throws 91-92 and also adds a slider and change, but he relies on a straight cut fastball and a sinking four-seamer that acts like a sinker. He got roughed up a bit in his big-league call-up, but he remains a solid prospect, albeit one who’s lack of pure stuff and bat-missing ability will always limit his hype (and ceiling).

It was just an administrative tweet, but it’s indicative of something. MLB Roster Resource, a website that tracks/projects the active and 40-man roster for each team flipped James Paxton and Nate Karns in the M’s projected roster. Those outsiders who are really, really focused on the details of the roster now give Karns the upper hand. Now, they, like all of us, don’t actually get to make that determination, and you can quibble with their projections at 1B or the bench, but Paxton’s poor start yesterday really does seem to give Nate Karns the upper hand. It wasn’t one of those crazy Arizona days where any fly ball has a chance to become a HR. Paxton’s control and command were off, and that’s more concerning, especially at this stage of camp. As I’ve said, Karns hasn’t done a whole lot to make this decision an easy one. He’s been steady, but the lack of whiffs is something to watch, and while there must be mitigating circumstances, he’s a strikeout pitcher, and it’d be nice to see that reflected in his results.

His job should be a bit easier today, as the M’s face a split-squad Rangers club. His opposing starter is a youngster who just made AA last year, and got rocked by the Texas League. He threw a couple of pitches in spring training 3 years ago, so the last time we saw him, he was…well, a Jerry Dipoto-style arm, with a straight, over-the-top fastball and a big, big curve ball. This hasn’t helped him get strikeouts in the minors, mind you, but it does explain why he’s been something of a fly ball pitcher.

Speaking of roster moves, the M’s sent three players to AAA today: C Mike Zunino (that was expected), OF Boog Powell (maybe/sorta expected) and RP Cody Martin (only unexpected because so many relievers are still hurt). Charlie Furbush sounds like he’s responding to rest, and should be ready to pitch in a Cactus League game by tomorrow night.

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James Paxton gets stretched out to 5 innings today, and he’ll have RP Tony Zych throwing behind him. Jerry Dipoto was on the broadcast yesterday, saying that he still sees the 5th starter fight between Paxton and Nate Karns as an equal one, with both pitchers landing some shots. Looking only at spring training, it really is pretty even, though maybe not what we would’ve wanted or expected. In fact, neither pitcher is at or near the top of his game. Paxton’s velo is still low, averaging 91 according to BrooksBaseball, which corrects for all of the fastballs mislabeled as cutters, and also measures velocity at 55 feet, not the 50 used by MLB Advanced Media’s gameday. I know that many/most people pooh-pooh early March velocity concerns, but this has been studies, and yes, it really does seem to matter. On the other side, while Karns’ velo is right where you’d want it, he’s just not missing many bats, and that’s kind of odd for a guy who K’d nearly a batter an inning last season. Part of it may be a slight change to his approach – he’s using his sinker a bit more this spring, maybe as a way to avoid HRs in the punishing heat/winds of Arizona (yesterday’s game was kind of funny for the number of routine fly balls that got pushed to or over the wall) – and maybe he’s just not feeling his curve just yet. But he’s pitched 9 IP thus far with just a single K, even worse than Paxton’s 4 in 9 IP. Unlike velo or what have you, this really does feel like kvetching about tiny-sample stats, but it’s a half-raised, very small red flag. Someone needs to WIN this competition, not just back their way into the rotation.

Kendall Graveman is in many ways the anti-Paxton (or anti-Karns!). While Paxton and Karns have high-spin, rising four-seamers that they can/should use up in the zone, Graveman has one of the lower spin rates you’ll find. That’s not necessarily bad, it’s just different, and it means Graveman needs a different approach to be successful. The righty came to Oakland as part of the big Josh Donaldson deal as a fairly polished, MLB-ready 4th-5th starter. Thus far, that’s pretty much what he’s looked like. The lack of spin means his FB sinks a bit more than most, and thus he’s a very good ground ball pitcher. When he elevates the ball, batters can hit it a long way – without rise, and without much velo, Graveman needs great command. His high HR rate despite being a ground ball guy and playing in Oakland can attest for his slim margin of error.

Steve Cishek AND Tony Zych, two relievers who’ve been delayed by a forearm strain and the flu, respectively, figure to get some innings today. The M’s bullpen corps got trimmed down a bit yesterday when the club released Justin DeFratus, the ex-Phillies righty. The club wants to resign him to a minor league deal, but we’ll see what DeFratus elects to do. Today, the M’s grabbed ex-Rangers reliever Steve Johnson, another Dipoto-style arm with a rising FB that’s not super-fast and a big, high-spin curve ball. He’s on a minor league deal.

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]]>3739Revisiting the M’s Top Prospects of 2006http://blog.seattlepi.com/ussmariner/2016/03/15/revisiting-the-ms-top-prospects-of-2006/
Wed, 16 Mar 2016 00:30:35 +0000http://www.ussmariner.com/?p=22346I mentioned it in a game thread a few days ago, but seriously, you really have to read this Sam Miller piece at BP that looks at what’s become of the Rays top 30 prospects ten years later. It’s the fourth in a series of posts Sam’s done, detailing the outcome of the top farm system in baseball ten years previously. What’s fascinating is not just that many prospects bust, but, and this should’ve been obvious, what teams DO with their prospects vary widely. The Brewers group of 2003 (a group put together largely by Jack Zduriencik) got solid production from the very top of their list – headed by Prince Fielder, JJ Hardy and Rickie Weeks – but struggled to do much with everyone else, and if that isn’t some pretty big foreshadowing of the Zduriencik era in Seattle, I don’t know what is. The Angels did a bit better *despite* the fact that their top prospects at the time – Dallas McPherson and Brandon Wood – are legendary prospect busts. But they had a deep system, and thus got plenty of production from Kendrys Morales, Howie Kendrick, Erick Aybar and the like, and they made a few smaller moves with that cohort, including flipping Kendrick for today’s pre-arb starter, Andrew Heaney. The Rays article represents a very different approach. Instead of keeping their top prospects together, they were very selective about the players they kept, and after that, traded liberally with anyone who’d listen. What this means is that, even ten years later, the Rays still have a bunch of prospects and cost-controlled players they acquired in exchange for earlier prospects, who they acquired in exchange for the prospects on that original 2006 list. As a result, they’ve put up far more WAR as a result of their original list, many of their *current* prospects are in the organization as a result of the original prospects.

The Rays were remarkable in that they ID’d the right players to sign (Evan Longoria) and the right players to sell high on (Delmon Young), and then they kept parlaying one set of acquisitions into another, turning Delmon Young into Matt Garza into Chris Archer. The Angels weren’t quite as adept as that, but their deep system still provided the basis for 5-6 years of contention, thanks to the infield tandem of Kendrick and Aybar. So, what would the M’s look like in this kind of analysis? What would we learn, apart from the basic fact that baseball, like life, is pain, and that point-in-time errors cascade through the seasons, bringing old ghosts and new torments together in a Grand Guignol of… sorry, got a bit carried away. I’m not going to lie: doing this means reliving some of the most painful, most self-destructive moments in recent M’s history. This might hurt a bit.
To do this, we’re going to take a look at the M’s top 20 prospects as rated by Minor League Ball’s John Sickels. First, it’s freely available, and the top 20 really aren’t going to vary too much – the placement of this or that guy might change, but the actual group of 20 should be pretty consistent, particularly the all-important top 5 or so. Second, 20 is less than 30, and we’re all busy people. So, let’s go to the list:

Ok, on first glance, this is actually a pretty decent group. Remember, the systems Miller’s investigating were all seen as #1 overall (or close to it) groups. The M’s were never in that category, so if they got a bit less value, hey, no one ever thought this was the equivalent of the Rays system. And yet, these players have produced in the big leagues as much as the groups in Miller’s articles: by bWAR, Shin-Soo Choo’s been worth 29 WAR (28 by Fangraphs), Jones had 27.5 (25.5 by fWAR), Cabrera’s chipped in with 22 (16), Chris Tillman 9.5 (8), and Valbuena 6 (6). That production is roughly equivalent to what the Brewers got out of their group, and it’s right in line with the Rays group, headlined as it was by Young, Reid Brignac and, yes, okay, Evan Longoria. Jeff Niemann was OK for a while, as was Jeremy Hellickson, and Wade Davis certainly became something else for someone else. Longoria’s better than Choo, but the production from the M’s group *as a whole* is pretty much on par. That’s the good news.

Now we’ve got to do the bad part. The first to exit the list is Cabrera, traded in late June for Eduardo Perez. Perez would retire after posting a sub-replacement half-year in Seattle. A few weeks later, the M’s would go back to the well, trading Choo for 1B Ben Broussard. Broussard ended up with about 0 WAR over half of 2006 and half of ’07, then got fewer than 100 PAs to close out his MLB career in Texas. The M’s acquired Tug Hulett in that deal, who was sub-replacement level and then waived. For two players who’d go on to make All-Star teams, are still playing, and who posted over 50 WAR combined, the M’s got less than nothing. Instead of bushy, ever-bearing trade trees like the Rays, the M’s got two shoots that were instantly charred by the sun. The next trade will probably be better.

Nope. In a move that probably destroyed a non-negligble portion of USSMariner’s collective soul, the M’s send Chris Snelling (and Emiliano Fruto) to Washington for DH Jose Vidro. Vidro had a decent 2007, then a sub-replacement level 2008, and retired. Another branchless-tree. Snelling obviously never reached the highs that Choo/Cabrera did, but the pattern’s pretty strong here. The M’s front office at the time actively targeted older players, trying to get the M’s roster into contention. The Rays strategy of targeting young players is risky, but the Rays balance that by dealing in volume, bringing in Costco-packages of minor leaguers when they deal, say, Matt Garza, instead of focusing the return in one, older, gravitas-laden player. That would be OK if it worked, but it did not for Mr. Bavasi.

At the end of 2006, the M’s also released Clint Nageotte, who wouldn’t pitch in the majors again, and waived Bobby Livingston, who’d make a handful of starts for Cincinnati. Edgar Guaramato retired after the 2006 season, which he spent in the Midwest League.

In early 2007, the M’s traded Yorman Bazardo for Jeff Frazier (Todd’s brother). Bazardo went on to pitch in the majors with Detroit while Frazier was released after the 2007 season, and promptly resigned with the Tigers. So that was fabulous. Travis Blackley could’ve been on a list like this,* but he was traded for Jason Ellison, resulting in not much. Cesar Jimenez hurt his shoulder, a problem that would recur sporadically, though hey, he’s still pitching in the majors, and Clint Nageotte, and his fabulous slider, is not. In August, the M’s outrighted Oswaldo Navarro off the 40-man, and traded Sebastian Boucher to Baltimore for reliever John Parrish. Parrish somehow yielded 22 hits in his 10 1/3 IP as a Mariner and then, mercifully, left as a free agent. Lamest trade-trees ever. Oh, and Craig James was released. Maybe a blockbuster trade would help?

Nooooo, it would not. The M’s packaged Jones, Chris Tillman, Tony Butler, Kam Mickolio and George Sherrill and sent them to Baltimore in exchange for LHP Erik Bedard. This worked out swimmingly for the O’s, as Sherrill made the All-Star team that year, and Jones would a bit later, along with Tillman. The Orioles, the team making the rebuild trade, ended up in the playoffs in 2012. The M’s…did not. Bedard made it through three injury plagued years, signing as a free agent twice. As a result, it’s not clear if the M’s get credit for the players Bedard brought back once he was dealt to Boston in 2011, but hey, what the hell: Trayvon Robinson and Chih-Hsien Chang came over. Robinson made the big club, but a high K rate and no power, and produced a bit under replacement level until he was traded to Baltimore for Robert Andino who also produced less than replacement level. Neither player has made the majors since, and the tree ends here, as Andino was traded for “Cash consideration” and Chih-Hsien Chang was horrific in a year in the M’s minors before being released. It’s generally hard to say that one team or another “won” or “lost” a trade, given different aims, different places on the win curve, different organizational needs, but the M’s lost this trade, and lost the trade’s echoes, turning a disappointing return into worse returns.

Following the disastrous 2008 season, Jack Zduriencik took over, and attempted to quickly overhaul the roster, leading to a lot of churn and some of the few bright spots in this sad tale. At this point, late in 2008, 10 of the original top 20 remain. First, Z pulled off a huge three-team trade with the Mets and Indians, sending closer JJ Putz, OF Jeremy Reed and Sean Green east for a bunch of prospects, but also flipping Luis Valbuena for a young, sometimes injured, but it’s nothing and is probably meaningless and nothing to fret about CF named Franklin Gutierrez. Depending on how you apportion this out, Valbuena and Guti were minor components of a much bigger deal, or you could say the Seattle/Cleveland part was almost a separate trade, and take it as a one-to-one swap. In any event, Guti’s earned around 12 WAR, while Valbuena’s earned around half of that for Chicago and Houston.

The next big move was the trade of C Jeff Clement, erstwhile #1 prospect, for a package of SS Jack Wilson and SP Ian Snell. While Clement was the only member of the 2006 prospect list heading east, the M’s were also clearing out some of Bavasi’s later draft picks in pitchers Aaron Pribanic, Nate Adcock and Brett Lorin. While the prospects didn’t do much, neither did Wilson and Snell: Wilson was brilliant defensively, but didn’t hit enough to stick in the line-up, giving way to Brendan Ryan for the cycle to begin again anew. Thanks to his defense, Wilson was actually worth a few WAR with Seattle, so this move certainly didn’t hurt, but Snell, who seemed like such a good buy-low, bounce-back starter simply imploded, turning in a sub-replacement level season in 2010 and seeing his big league career effectively end at age 28. Jack Wilson was sent to Atlanta for a PTBNL, so again, we have another branchless tree, a species seemingly endemic to the Puget Sound region.

That same month (July of 2009), the M’s sent Wladimir Balentien to Cincinnati for reliever Robert Manuel, who was released after a truly abysmal half-year for Tacoma. Manuel ended up making the Red Sox for a brief period in 2010, but the M’s got nothing for him when he left the org after 2009. Ryan Feierabend stuck around through 2010, but he and Anthony Varvaro left the org as free agents, signing with Philadelphia and Atlanta, respectively. Mike Wilson stuck around to help Tacoma win the PCL in 2010, and finally left after 2012 as a minor league free agent.

That left one player, Michael Saunders, still in the organization. He too was moved for a veteran in a rent-a-player transaction, this time a few months before the 2015 season. Saunders went to Toronto in exchange for FA-to-be JA Happ, whom the M’s then flipped to Pittsburgh for Adrian Sampson. Sampson is still in the org, and figures to begin 2016 in the minors, likely with Tacoma, meaning that the M’s were able to turn a 2006 prospect into a 2016 prospect – they finally grew a tree with a branch. Even that small success is tinged with shrug-emoji, as Happ immediately turned into a world-beater under the tutelage of Ray Searage and signed a sizable FA contract back with Toronto.

What have we learned from all of this? First: the Bavasi administration really did try to get production by swapping their prospects for MLB-ready talent. They used the exact same approach as the Rays, they just totally bungled it. Like any team, though, they carefully kept a few prospects off the trading block, trying to build around them the way the Angels and Brewers did. They just totally bungled it. They had MLB All-Star talent, but shipped it off while the guys they rated higher busted. In contrast, while the Zduriencik regime was happy to move any and all remaining Bavasi prospects, they tried to keep their core more or less intact. A very, very different organization using a very, very different approach ended up in a similar spot because they, too, struggled to ID the future stars from the future waiver-wire fodder. The main similarity, though, isn’t related to the prospects themselves, but rather the players both Zduriencik and Bavasi targeted in exchange for the prospects. Failed win-now pushes in 2006 and 2007, and then another in 2009-10 not only didn’t produce a playoff team, they produced players with literally zero value. It’s still a bit early to tell with Jerry Dipoto, and the bar he has to clear is just sitting there on the ground, but I’m hoping he and his pro scouting team are able to identify MLB talent in a way the M’s just haven’t been able to do in recent years.

* That’s what’s so amazing. This list didn’t yet have Chris Tillman, who was drafted in ’06, and it didn’t have Yuni Betancourt, who’d been a big-time prospect the year before and spent enough time in the majors that he couldn’t be excluded here. It just didn’t matter. Tillman was in the Bedard trade, and Betancourt produced Dan Cortes and Derick Saito; Saito was done a half-year later, while Cortes left via free agency. The M’s turned a starting shortstop (yes, yes, a bad one, I’ll grant that) into two more trade stumps. The other guy that 2005 list had? Someone named Bernandez or something. The sheer amount of future big league production on these lists is kind of staggering, and even while the M’s kept and nurtured their best prospect since A-Rod, and even while they had MLB All-stars dotting the lists, they weren’t able to translate that into sustained contention, which is as depressing as it is remarkable. The Rays trade trees are still young, and still huge, while the M’s are a hillside after a clearcut, with Felix on top of it.

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This was supposed to be Wade Miley’s start, but as he’d already faced Anaheim, the M’s are having him play in a minor league game to avoid giving Anaheim too much scouting info on the M’s #3 starter. Of course, Miley’s a big league vet, and faced them last year as a member of the Red Sox, but hey, I get it, don’t let the Angels get too comfortable timing Miley or learning every contour of every pitch. Fine. And while Cody Martin’s not a starter, he’s actually somewhat interesting, especially in light of the rash of injuries to bullpen guys like Scribner, Cook and Furbush (and Steve Cishek had a minor bicep issue as well).

When he came to Seattle, I mentioned that Martin’s repertoire had changed markedly once he joined the Oakland A’s. Instead of pitching off a four-seam fastball, he all but abandoned it in favor of a pretty mediocre cutter and a rudimentary slider. It was a very Oakland sort of move, but Martin’s results were awful. In that post, I said he should forget the cutter and focus more on the four-seamer. Thus far with the M’s, it’s looking like he’s back to throwing more four-seamers, and he’s thrown only four cutters. That’s nice, but given the vagaries of Peoria’s pitch fx system, it’d be good to see if that was a one-two game blip, or if his arsenal really has changed. It’s looking like he’s throwing more sinkers now, too, which makes some sense for a guy who had serious HR problems last year.

Andrew Heaney came over to LAA from the Dodgers in exchange for 2B Howie Kendrick, and had a promising rookie year. A lefty who throws from a somewhat arm angle – his release point is way, way towards 1B – he’s always shown great control and the ability to really eat up left-handers. Given that angle and a sinker-heavy pitch mix, you might expect some platoon split problems, and while he’s certainly got splits, righties haven’t done as much damage as you might think. Part of the reason is his change-up, which gets nearly a foot of armside run (very Mike Montgomery-ish), and the other part may be knowing how to use spacious parks. Heaney gets left-handers to hit the ball on the ground, but he’s a fly-ball pitcher against righties, which is why his overall GB% is below 40%. All of those fly balls haven’t hurt him that much, though – his HR/FB is low, and while it’s a bit higher vs. righties, as you might expect, it was low enough that he didn’t really have a HR issue against righties. Note this isn’t the same thing as having huge home/away splits the way many of his teammates do: Heaney gave up 7 out of his 9 HRs at home, and had worse numbers overall in the HR-suppressing Angels Stadium.

The M’s get to face former prospect Ji-Man Choi, who signed on with Anaheim after being waived by Seattle this past fall. The Angels are going with their #1 middle-of-the-order with Trout/Pujols/Calhoun in the 3-5 spots today.

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]]>3737Cactus League: Happy First Felix Day of 2016http://blog.seattlepi.com/ussmariner/2016/03/14/cactus-league-happy-first-felix-day-of-2016/
Mon, 14 Mar 2016 19:05:41 +0000http://www.ussmariner.com/?p=22338Baseball mitosis once again, as the M’s split into two to take on the Rockies and Diamondbacks simultaneously.
vs. Colorado:
King Felix vs. Tyler Chatwood, 1:10pm (Televised on Root Sports and MLB.tv)

vs. Arizona:
Taijuan Walker vs. Zack Greinke, 1:10pm (mlb.tv)

Happy Felix Day. By this point in spring, the thrill of seeing recognizable players making recognizable baseball actions starts to wear off, and while there’s still some excitement about Opening Day, there’s also a realization that there are still weeks worth of practice games to slog through. That’s why it’s always nice the way Felix parachutes into the fray a good 2-3 weeks later than the non-royal Mariners, providing a nice jolt of energy (and sunshine, lollipops and rainbows) to the proceedings. He’s done this pretty much every year, so it’s not injury-related. It’s just his royal prerogative, kind of like the weird, Guy Frieri-influenced hair he’s sporting.

He’ll face off against Tyler Chatwood, the sinkerballer who hasn’t pitched in a big league game since April of 2014. Chatwood was an Angels prospect many years ago, back in the days when the Angels thought to have prospects, and after a weird, not-so-great debut season in which he mixed a lot of walks with very few strikeouts, he was shipped to Colorado in exchange for new Mariner, Chris Iannetta. The Rockies saw a very young, hard-throwing arm who could get ground balls, which even Colorado hasn’t figured out how to turn into home runs. His initial run for the Rockies wasn’t great, as his BABIP and walks produced plenty of baserunners. In 2013, though, he produced a very solid year, with a GB rate approaching 60%, not even a high BABIP could spoil his ERA, and the lack of dingers made up for his still-ugly K:BB ratio. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last. Very early in 2014, he blew out his elbow, just as he had as a high-schooler in Southern California. Repeat-TJ surgeries have a longer rehab time, and the assumption that he’d miss all of 2015 proved correct (he technically got in 4 innings in the California League). He’s back now trying to re-take his rotation spot, and given the state of the Rockies, he’s probably got a good shot to do so. He throws a sinker (and four-seamer) around 94 (er, he used to, at least), along with a so-so change and curve, and the slider he refined after moving to the Rockies org. The slider’s actually capable of missing bats, but Chatwood’s never going to be a big strikeout guy. If he lacks the wide platoon splits you might expect from a sinker/slider pitcher, it’s only because he hasn’t been particularly good against either side.

In the other game, Tai Walker tries to build on his eye-popping performance the other day by facing off against the D-Backs and Greinke, the biggest FA acquisition of the off-season. Greinke seemed to turn a corner with the Dodgers, posting career-low walk rates in both 2014 and 2015 while maintaining an elite strand rate. The K:BB ratio remains impressive, but the Dodgers may have been scared off a bit by his absurdly low BABIP in 2015 and a very low HR/FB ratio. In his career, Greinke’s never been someone with an extremely low BABIP, but he has shown some signs of being able to limit HRs. That’ll be put to the test as he moves from a HR-suppressing park in LA to a great hitting environment in Arizona. Still, that strand rate’s pretty interesting, and if he’s able to keep that up, he could again allow fewer runs than his FIP might predict. The D-Backs are such an interesting team. The sabermetric crowd pilloried them for the Shelby Miller trade (rightly so, in my opinion), but that’s just a symptom of a broader disagreement with the club. The D-Backs believe they’re entering their window to contend, and the moves for Greinke and Miller show that they may have actually yanked it forward by a year or so. Their core of Goldschmidt, Pollock, Greinke and now Miller is as good as any in the league, but many in the analytic crowd still feel that their depth, the supporting cast around that core, isn’t good enough to win a tough NL West. Trading for Jean Segura or hoping for growth from Yasmani Tomas make perfect sense to Arizona, while the likes of Dave Cameron scoff that they’re actually hurting their chances to contend in 2017-18. We’ll soon see if Arizona can actually compete with LA or San Francisco, let alone Chicago and Pittsburgh.

After splitting their split-squad games yesterday, the M’s take a slightly smaller roster back to their home park to face Cincinnati. Reds prospect Cody Reed was dominant yesterday, and today they’ll face off against another young hurler who figures to have a rotation spot sewn up. Thankfully for the M’s, DeSclafini isn’t a lefty throwing a plus fastball and a plus breaking ball – he came up initially with the Marlins as more of a command guy, albeit with enough velo and movement to get some strikeouts. The problem was that his excellent control came at a cost: he got a lot of the plate, and thus gave up a lot of hard contact, leading to very high BABIPs. Home runs weren’t a particular problem, which is interesting given his fly-ball tendencies, but batters in the minors and majors have consistently posted higher-than-average BABIPs. A move to Cincinnati and a home park that tough on fly-ballers who get a lot of the plate forced DeSclafini to make some adjustments: last year, he walked more batters, but kept his HR rate in check by giving up more ground balls.

As it turns out, DeSclafini changed his pitch mix fairly substantially in the second half of last season. Instead of a textbook average four-seam, he shifted to his sinker, which he’ll throw at 92-93. He ditched his change-up and started throwing a lot more curve balls. This all had salutary effects on his K:BB ratio, but it didn’t quite solve the “lots of dudes are squaring up his pitches” problem. We’ll see if further adjustments can help with that, or if DeSclafini is in the Ryan Franklin family of pitchers who admirably won’t be scared out of the zone, and are forced to take some punishment as a result.

Nate Karns’ route to the 5th starter job got a tiny bit easier today when the M’s announced that they’d be shifting Mike Montgomery to the bullpen. Montgomery was excellent yesterday, tossing three shutout innings in what looks like his final start, and if you read yesterday’s post, you know that I’m not sure this is the best role for him. That said, as M’s relievers continue to fall with injuries (today, the M’s announced Charlie Furbush may not be ready for opening day, and he still hasn’t appeared in a spring game), his odds of making the team and not spinning the waiver wheel are better. Karns’ primary opposition for the #5 spot, James Paxton, also pitched yesterday, and looked fairly good, but again, his velocity simply isn’t where you’d expect it to be. Pitch FX again classified most of his fastballs as cutters, which makes the average velocity for either pitch kind of useless. That it’s confusing the two at all is a bad sign, as is the fact that Paxton’s touching 93 only very, very rarely.

Thus far, Karns has been a bit different than we would’ve expected. After spending his first full season as a high-strikeout, high-homer, high-fly-ball guy, he’s been a ground-balling pitch-to-contact guy in Peoria. This is one of the many reasons why it’s so hard to get a handle on spring training stats. Sometimes guys really are just working on things, or trying a new pitch. Still, in a tough competition for a key role on the club, Karns should probably start missing a few more bats.

Mike Montgomery’s probably not a prospect anymore, but he certainly was at one point – about 5-6 years ago in the Royals org. Kansas City drafted Cody Reed as well, a lefty from a Mississippi junior college who had a velocity spike that carried him from unknown to second round pick. Reed did well in his first pro season, then problems with his delivery torpedoed his 2014 – his K rate dropped and batters started barreling up his still-plenty-fast-fastball. The K rate dropped again in his first taste of AA, but after he was included as a high-risk, high-reward piece in the Royals deadline deal for Johnny Cueto, something seemed to click. In the Reds org, his K% jumped to nearly 30% (it was nearly half that in the Texas league, when he was still with the Royals org). Whatever mechanical change the Reds made, it’s turned Reed from toolsy thrower into one of the better pitching prospects around, and a serious candidate to make the Reds opening day rotation. Of course, the go-nowhere Reds traded away half of their rotation last year, and while they have plenty of young arms in camp, Reed (and Robert Stephenson) have more pure talent than many of the vets ahead of them. Given that the Reds figure to be one of the worst teams in baseball, the Reds may opt to keep Reed down for a month to get an extra year of club control.

Montgomery seems like a AAAA guy, an out-of-options lefty who simply doesn’t profile as a LOOGY or situational reliever because his great change means he’s not a real lefty-killer; he may be better against righties. I love his change, though after a fast start, the league seemed to figure him out. Coming into camp, I gave him long odds to stick with the org through the month: he wasn’t going to be in the rotation, he just doesn’t fit in the bullpen, and they can’t send him to the minors. But new pitching coach Mel Stottlemeyer, jr. seemed to see something intriguing in him, and he just seems like the kind of guy a good pitching coach could really help. His odds are better than I initially thought now, but his slow start due to injury means he’s going to have to show a lot in a short time. If everything goes well, he could stick around as the long man in the bullpen, though the M’s are going to need to figure out what role the loser in the Paxton/Karns battle will take as well. Anyway, immediate transformations due to a mechanical tweak don’t happen often, but Cody Reed shows what can happen when they do. Yes, yes, Reed is much, much more talented and has a good 6mph edge in velo, but to me, there’s no reason a guy with as much run/sink on a change thrown with good arm action should get knocked around consistently in both MLB and AAA. Montgomery is *better* than he’s shown, but he’s running out of chances to prove it.

Back in Peoria, the M’s face some fraction of the LA Dodgers. In large part, that’s due to the fact that LA too is split-squadding, sending half of their club to face the Cubs, but it’s also due to a rash of injuries that have hit today. The biggest name to head to the trainer is SS and by some accounts the #1 prospect in baseball, Corey Seager, who’s having an MRI on his knee after hurting it running the bases yesterday. Then, today’s starting pitcher, Alex Wood, was scratched with forearm tightness (never a good sign), so the M’s will face hard-throwing sinkerballer Carlos Frias instead. OF Alex Guerrero was penciled into today’s line-up, but he’s been scratched with a knee issue of his own – he’d been held out for a few days along with 2B Howie Kendrick. Rough week in Dodger camp.

Frias throws 94-96, and has a four-seam and sinker with similar velo. He’s got a change-up, but his outpitch is a hard cutter, thrown around 90mph. It’s a huge whiff pitch and also gets ground ball contact, which is handy, because he’s been remarkably ineffective at getting hitters to whiff on his fastballs. It’s just odd to see a guy who missed some bats in the minors, and then in a brief trial in 2014, post a K/9 under 5 last year in a dozen or so starts. Did I mention he sits in the mid-90s? Of course, with a hard sinker and a cutter that gets GBs, he’s excellent at inducing grounders, but those grounders tended to find holes last year. He pitched around that mediocre BABIP fairly well, but some added strikeouts would help his cause.

Paxton figures to get 4 IP today, so we’ll be able to check in on how his velocity’s progressing. Always find it interesting one one split-squad gets 90% of the 1st string talent, and that’s what it looks like today with the Peoria contest. Smith/Romero/Navarro is a very different middle-of-the-order from Cano/Cruz/Lind.

The M’s made a minor transaction today, grabbing out-of-options back-up catcher Rob Brantly off of waivers from the White Sox org. To make room on the 40-man, the M’s moved RP Ryan Cook to the 60-day DL; that strained lat is looking more and more like a very serious problem. Brantly’s a rare left-handed hitting catcher, a fact that seems kind of useful until you remember that Steve Clevenger is also a left-handed hitting catcher. As Larry Stone mentioned, this seems like an insurance policy in case Clevenger or Iannetta get hurt before camp closes. As Brantly’s out of options, he could be back on waivers in a month, the cruel fate of playing for 5 clubs in 2 years that often befall those who’ve burned their option years. Brantly isn’t much of a hitter, and hasn’t rated too well in BP’s framing and pitch-blocking metrics, but hey, catching depth is catching depth, and they didn’t give up any talent to get him.

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